Media Outreach

This past weekend I was a leader for a Disciple Now camping weekend for a friend’s church. The rain cleared off just for the weekend, so it was perfect camping weather…cold at night, which resulted in everyone talking around the campfire.

I listened to the high school girls talk about Facebook and their parent’s lack of knowledge on the popular networking site. It was humorous and gave me some quality ideas for blog posts.

I figured it might be helpful to some of you to explain how Facebook works and what you’re looking at when you sign in to your account.

1.    What does all the stuff mean on your “home page”?
After signing in, your home page automatically pulls up. The information that shows up on this page depends on what types of applications you’ve added to your account. For example, if you play Farmville, you might have your “farm” show up on this page. But more than likely the standard information that you will see is going to be the News Feed, Requests, Events, Notifications and Suggestions.

The news feed is NOT what people are saying to you. This encompasses all of your friend’s activities on Facebook. It tells you who became friends with who, what your friends are doing and contains any links or videos that your friends have posted. Don’t worry…this is not your wall. The stuff in the news feed is not directed at you.

2.    How do you remove certain items from your news feed?
So you have a friend who posts nonsense constantly and you don’t want to read it in your news feed. The answer is simple. Hold your mouse over your friend’s post. There will be a little button that appears to the right side of the post that says “hide.” Click this button and you will hide this user’s updates. Don’t worry, you’ll still be friends with this person, but their posts won’t show up in your news feed.

3.    What’s the different between a friend suggestion and a friend request?
A friend request is when you or someone clicks the “add as friend” button on a profile.

A friend suggestion is simply someone telling you “hey, I think you might want to be friends with this person.”  You don’t have to add them as a friend. It’s not a request. If you want to add the suggested person as a friend, you will have to click “add as friend.”

4.    What are the “requests” that appear on the top right of my page?
Requests are anything that your friends invite you to be a part of. Maybe your friend is having a party and sent an invite through Facebook. You can RSVP and get the details to this event by clicking on the event link. Or maybe your friend is a huge fan of a certain product and thinks you should become a “fan” too. They might ask you to become a fan of a certain “page.” By becoming a fan, you’re opting to receive announcements about this particular item. They will show up in your newsfeed or you might receive a message in your inbox. You can ignore or confirm a page request. It’s not going to hurt your friend’s feelings if you ignore the request.

5.    What are “notifications?”
Notifications are just what they are called…they notify you when someone added you as a friend, invited you to an event, suggested you become a fan of a page…the list could go on. You can adjust which notifications you want to receive under the account tab under “account settings.”

I could keep going…but this should be good for now. If you have specific questions, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer.

Photo By: RVWithTito